Opportunities for energy savings in pico/femto-cell base-stations

To support the growth and the dynamism in today's wireless communication, networks are evolving towards smaller cells and base-stations closer to the mobile users. This evolution opens the possibility to deal with one of the main problems in mobile networks: the energy consumption of the base-stations. In this paper, different opportunities are proposed to save energy in small-cell base-stations. These solutions, targeting energy adaptation, focus on the most power greedy components. The energy savings are shown both for the individual components as for a typical pico-cell base-station operating on LTE signals and considering a daily data traffic profile. This offers an average energy saving of 30%, but the flexible nature of the proposed solutions can be further exploited in heterogeneous networks.